Review: 'Carsick' by John Waters

John Waters weaves fact with fiction in his new book about hitchhiking, "Carsick."

John Waters weaves fact with fiction in his new book about hitchhiking, "Carsick." (Shauta Marsh/Farrar, Straus and Giroux photo)

Sam Worley

At the beginning of his new quasi-memoir, "Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America," filmmaker Waters asks the question that, really, is at the hopeful heart of this endeavor: "Is all hitchhiking gay?"

And how. In the first hundred pages, Waters has a fling with a "crazily rugged but tenderhearted and slightly deviant demolition derby driver"; plays voyeur to an exhibitionist escaped convict, nicknamed Ready Whip on account of his eagerness to show off — well, you know; and discovers a world of orgiastic pleasures at an off-the-grid "pirate truck stop."

This, alas, is fiction — the scene where Waters is sexually assaulted by an alien would give it away if the author hadn't already — included in "Carsick" in such rich detail due to the narrative contrivances of Waters' book contract. I mean, book.

The setup is that Waters — the director of "Hairspray" and "Pink Flamingos," the "Pope of Trash," the groomer of one of the world's great mustaches — has gotten a deal to hitchhike across the country from his Baltimore house to his San Francisco apartment. Before we get to that, though, he offers two "novellas": one imagining the best trip possible (all that sex, somebody to finance his new movie) and one imagining the worst (decapitated by a serial killer, discovers that hell is "It's a Wonderful Life" on eternal loop). The final third of "Carsick" describes the actual, regrettably chaste event.

According to the book, Waters wrote his novellas before he embarked on his trip. But they read like something added by an author who didn't have quite enough original material, or who wasn't prepared for how much of hitchhiking is standing around waiting. The relentlessly gonzo fictional chapters become wearying, though some passages offer a window into the anxieties of an entertainer whose long career has been devoted to the risqué — as when he's (fictionally) kidnapped and tormented by devotees of Gertrude Baniszewski, the (nonfictional) Indianapolis woman who, with her children, tortured and murdered teenager Sylvia Likens in 1965. Kate Millett wrote a book on the case; Waters' contribution to the release party, he recalls, was a cake decorated with the words that the Baniszewskis had carved into Likens' chest. Turns out a joke like that may haunt you, if only in an imaginary scene from your worst cross-country nightmare.

"Carsick" can be tedious, but Waters is never unlikable. As narrator, he's an affable egoist, separated from the American mainstream by the strange combination of being a champion of subcultural behaviors and identities and also being very rich. In other words, Waters seems not to have spent much time eating in travel plazas. "Hmmmm," he weighs options at one point, "the Outback Steakhouse? Looks less corporate than the others, plus I've never heard of it."

Hitchhiking for real, he's touched by the several people who try to give him money, at one point accepting $20 from a woman who hears his protestations — he's a famous filmmaker, he has plenty of scratch — as insane. "You cheapskate," he chastises himself afterward, "why don't you go over there and give her $500?"

But a face as famous as Waters' is bound to be recognized. He gets a ride from the band Here We Go Magic, for instance, whose tweets about the experience make their way around the Internet.

Weirder, he's picked up in Maryland by an eager 20-year-old Republican town councilman whom he refers to as The Corvette Kid; a little research reveals this to be Brett Bidle, who gave an interview to the Baltimore Sun. Bidle drives Waters all the way to Ohio and is so amped about the experience that he returns to pick him up in Colorado — no kidding! They spend a night together (separate rooms) in Reno. "The hotel thinks I've checked in with some boy, and his parents think he's run off with a pornographer," Waters worries. "Plus I'm a Democrat." Feeling that to accept too much of Bidle's largesse would be cheating, Waters gives the kid keys to his place in San Francisco and sends him on ahead.

These interlocutors are just supporting cast, though, and "Carsick" would be a much better book if its author were more curious about the people he meets on the road. Instead, we get quick characterizations refracted through Waters' own benign narcissism, and his assumptions: the "real-life" hay farmer, the miner

"(c)overed in coal dust like in a comic strip." They're so normal that they're weird to him.

Which is an idea that Waters, a connoisseur of weirdness, might have explored in greater depth. A couple more weeks of hitchhiking may have reminded him of the fallacy of "normal," but "Carsick" finds him, at least, on the road to that realization. He gets a ride from a couple of people traveling to North Dakota, chasing the fracking boom. "These days everybody thinks he or she is an outsider, but here is the real deal," Waters writes. "Probably the only members of the fracking community I'll ever meet."

Sam Worley is a freelance writer and editor based in Yellow Springs, Ohio.